Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Everyone can find some reason to worry that the Internet is "out of control," but what's the alternative?
Jan 11, 2001 | One of the fine things about the Internet is that columnists get to share the burden of their labors. In any other medium, if a publication presented its readers with an argument as self-evidently silly as Caleb Carr's call for government "regulation" (i.e. censorship) of the Internet -- as Salon's Books site did on Monday -- a dissenting columnist would have to trudge wearily through the original article's rhetoric, pointing out its logical potholes and factual lacunae. On the Net, within hours of the piece's publication, you, the Salon readership, had, in a flood of e-mail, picked the bones of this carcass clean.
Here's a brief recap: A) Why trust an inevitably political government agency to do a fair job of sorting "fact" from lies online? B) If you're going to protect the public from "flawed" information online, why stop there? Shouldn't TV, radio, movies, newspapers and Carr's own books all be similarly "regulated"? C) There's no basis for assuming that people are any more stupid about sorting out lies from truth online than they are in any other medium. D) Even if there were, the Internet is way too vast to "regulate" by prior review of content, and even if you hired enough reviewers to vet the Web, what about e-mail, chat and all the other uses of the Internet? E) Even if you instituted a mammoth Federal Internet Content Review Board, it would be powerless to regulate Net content emerging from outside U.S. borders. F) Relax, since Carr's proposals could never pass constitutional muster, at least as long as John "dancing is dangerous" Ashcroft doesn't get to name his own Supreme Court majority.
There will always be nervous paternalists -- from all ends of the political spectrum -- who fret that the public should be shielded from "bad" ideas, "flawed" information, "biased" reporting and speech that could dangerously corrode the collective moral character. Fortunately for U.S. citizens, the combination of a strong First Amendment and a fragile but enduring national consensus embracing freedom of speech has always kept such proposals safely in the realm of ideas.
As the old saw goes, I may not agree with Carr but I'll defend to the death his right to argue for censorship. The moment such an argument mutates from speech to action, I'll begin to worry and fight. That crucial distinction between ideas and behavior -- though fraught with legal tension -- remains a helpful principle in navigating the issue of Internet regulation. In general, U.S. law has been more reluctant to regulate speech or information than to regulate commerce or transactions; since the Internet is widely used for both purposes, people get confused easily.
"The Internet is so very much more than a mere entertainment or news medium: It is also a research library, a marketplace and a schoolroom," Carr writes. Well, yes, sort of. If I operate a virtual school or store on the Web I may find my school affected by regulations applying to schools or stores elsewhere. The New York Times may be used in the classroom, and it may sell advertisements, but that doesn't make it a "school" or a "store" rather than a newspaper; and the news operations of an Internet company are no less deserving of First Amendment protection simply because other people may use the same medium for other purposes.
Carr's proposal may be odious to Net users steeped in the online culture's libertarian individualism, but there's no question that it represents the extreme edge of a much wider cultural distrust of the perceived anarchy of the Internet. Many Internet-rights partisans who roll their eyes at Carr will nonetheless support and promote government regulation of the Net in the area of personal privacy. In a story with a characteristic libertarian stance complete with a Cato Institute quote, Wired News reports that Ralph Nader is now calling for a global agency to protect Internet consumers' privacy and combat fraud. No matter where you sit, you probably have reason, somewhere in your psyche, to worry about the apparent absence of any controlling authority on the Net.
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